Award-Winning Author Willy Wilkinson

One of our Award-Winning Authors for August is Willy Wilkinson​.

He is an award-winning writer, public health consultant, cultural competency trainer, public speaker, and spoken word performer. Willy is the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning book "Born on the Edge of Race and Gender: A Voice for Cultural Competency," which illuminates trans experience from a Chinese American and mixed perspective, and transforms the memoir genre into a cultural competency tool. He is the recipient of a National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association award, and the Transgender Law Center Vanguard Award, and is recognized on the Trans 100.

Here is the link to our Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1741912596068410/

New Digs (Again)

Like many in San Francisco these days, Perfectly Queer has found itself a little peripatetic of late, which means, yes, we have a new (new) home--Dog Eared Books Castro--and here we hope to stay for many a moon. We certainly feel welcome!: dogearedbooks.com/castro

So, starting with the August Perfectly Queer book reading--Award-Winning Authors for August facebook.com/events/1741912596068410/--we'll be setting up wine and desserts, handing out door prizes, and providing a bookstore venue for lots more terrific Queer authors reading books you need to buy.  But, more about August in later blogs.  [Watch this space.]

DEB Castro brings a bookstore back to the Castro, for which many citizens are very thankful to owner Kate Rosenberger, manager Alvin Orloff, and staff.  And, just to prove that life is spiral--if not cyclical, DEB Castro is located in the same spot as another, iconic Castro bookstore, A Different Light, at 489 Castro, conveniently located next door to Cliff's Hardware, across from Strut, and just down the street from the Castro Theater.  What a gayborhood!

DEB Castro is hosting other readings too, such as Trebor Healey in late September and Martin Hyatt and Anne Raeff in early November so make their website one of your favorites and stay tuned.

See you in August!

 

Videos from "The Long and the Short of It"

Our July event, "The Long and the Short of It," at Books Inc. Opera Plaza drew over 25 people and turned out to be a real crowd pleaser (just as we expected it would be). If you were unable to be there, you can still view the videos of our three readers (Michael Alenyikov, Jim Provenzano, and Na'amen Gobert Tilahun) on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/perfectlyqueerreadings/

For our August event, Perfectly Queer will return to the Castro at the recently-opened Dog Eared Books (489 Castro Street, site of the former Different Light Books). Here is the link to our Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1741912596068410/

Award-winning authors Willy Wilkinson and Vincent Meis will read from the most recent works. See you Monday, August 8, 7:00 pm at Dog Eared Books!

Ivan & Misha, 40 Wild Crushes, and The Root: Books at July 2016 Perfectly Queer

  

In Ivan and Misha, a novel in linked stories by Michael Alenyikov, events swirl around fraternal twins and their father, Louie, as they make their way from Soviet-era Kiev to New York City in the late nineties and early aughts. Socially adrift, father and sons search for meaning in their divergent romantic relationships. Louie embarks on a traditional heterosexual dating relationship late in life, Ivan is sexually opportunistic and omnivorous, and Misha is torn between his family and the prospect of a committed gay relationship. The brothers’ search for connection leads them through a multitude of subcultures, all depicted in vivid detail.

40 Wild Crushes: Stories by Lambda Literary Award Winner Jim Provenzano is comprised of new and previously stories, as well as excerpts from Provenzano’s forthcoming novels. He presents teenage lust in summer theatre, cheating boyfriends on “The Tonight Show,” a transgender performer on the rise, and an escapee from a pumpkin farm—among other vivid characters and stories. Varying from terse accounts of an anti-gay assault to a post-9/11 moment of resolution, Provenzano shares a diverse array of contemporary experiences in rural Ohio and New York City, at funerals and wrestling matches, inside Manhattan cathedrals and Paris museums.  

The Root by Na’amen Gobert Tilahun is a dark, gritty urban fantasy debut set in modern-day San Francisco, filled with gods, sinister government agencies, and worlds of dark magic hidden just below the surface. When a secret government agency trying to enslave you isn’t the biggest problem you’re facing, you’re in trouble. A darkness is coming, something no one has faced in living memory. It eats. It hunts. In The Root, a dark and surging urban fantasy, two worlds must come together if even a remnant of one is to survive.

Diversity in Writing Reflects the Real World

Na'amen Gobert Tilahun is reading at Perfectly Queer July 11, 7 p.m., at Books Inc. Opera Plaza in San Francisco.  (facebook.com/events/619573908219248/)  He was recently named one of 13 Bay Area Authors to Watch and Read in 2016 by 7X7 magazine. His writing has been published by io9, Queers Dig Time Lords, Stone Telling, The Big Click, and more. His debut novel The Root was published by Night Shade Books this June.  It is the first in the Wrath & Athenaeum trilogy. The second volume, The Tree, will be out next June.

He advocates diversity in writing as a reflection of the real world.  He “believes all writing to be a political act that includes decisions on who to feature in your work and who to ignore and how to portray those you decide to feature.”

Na'amen said in his interview in The Qwillery blog June 9, 2016 that he was inspired to write The Root because he "wanted an Urban Fantasy that reflected my own lived experience.  Also, I wanted to explore/mess with the stereotype of the overly aggressive/violent black man and expand that simplistic idea into a three-dimensional character and one of the heroes of the text."

Na’amen is from Los Angeles and the Bay Area and now lives in Oakland.  He has a bachelors degree in English, with a focus on creative writing.  He is the co-creator and cohost of the geek podcast The Adventures of Yellow Peril + Magical Negro and has lived many a writer’s dream, having worked in a bookstore, in his case Borderlands.  Find out more about him and his writing at naamen.org.

Author, Journalist and Dancer Jim Provenzano at "The Long & Short of It"

Jim Provenzano is the author of five novels, a short story collection, numerous stories in anthologies and magazines, and a play. His novel Every Time I Think of You won a Lambda Literary Award and its sequel Message of Love was a LLA finalist. His stage adaptation of his novel PINS received the Bay Area Theatre Critics Award. He has also received several awards in journalism. For more information, see jimprovenzano.blogspot.com/

A graduate of Ohio State University in dance, Jim performed with the Pittsburgh Dance Alloy, the Bill Cratty Dance Theatre and choreographer Steve Gross and also created and performed his own works. He has been a reporter, columnist and editor at the Bay Area Reporter newspaper in San Francisco since 1989. He earned his Masters in English/Creative Writing from San Francisco State University in 1997.

July 11, Jim will read from his latest book, 40 Wild Crushes, his first short story collection, at the Perfectly Queer reading series program "The Long & Short of It," featuring writers who publish both long and short fiction. For more information on the reading, go to facebook.com/events/619573908219248

(author photo by Steven Underhill)

Michael Aleynikov, Author of Ivan and Misha

Michael Aleynikov is the pen name of the author of Ivan and Misha: A Novel in Stories, the forthcoming novella collection Sorrow's Drive: A Quartet, a novel in progress Angor Anime--the conjoined lives of four friends told from a different viewpoint each chapter, and numerous short stories published in literary magazines and anthologies, including the Chicago Quarterly Review of Books, the Georgia Review, the James White Review, Modern Words, and New York Stories.  He is a MacDowell Fellow and Gina Berriault Award winner.  Ivan and Misha won the Northern California Book Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Edmund White Award.  His short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and other honors.

Michael is originally from New York City but now lives in San Francisco.  He has worked as a cab drive, bookstore clerk, "interactive media writer," and a clinical psychologist.  He is the organizer of a  long-running free-write group in San Francisco and is a known frequenter of coffee shops and bookstores.

He will read from Ivan and Misha in "The Long & Short of It," the July 11 Perfectly Queer reading at Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness Avenue, in San Francisco.  Wine and appetizers at 6:45 p.m.  Readings begin at 7 p.m.  www.facebook.com/events/619573908219248 to rsvp.